Chapter Text
When Yoongi wakes up on Saturday morning, it feels like a scene from a movie, and he means that in the most negative, dire way possible. Like the playback of his life should scratch to a stop, freeze frame, and his own bewildered voiceover would say
You’re probably wondering how I ended up here.
Well, in order to do that Yoongi would have to go back. Way back. To the second week of first grade when Jung Hoseok showed up late to the school year because he had been on a trip with his parents to America. Or maybe mid-elementary school when Hoseok always had the newest shoes and trendiest clothes, and Yoongi was wearing his older cousin’s rumpled uniform and sneakers that peeled at the bottom. All of their middle school years are up for consideration (Hoseok started doing sports. Yoongi started working in his parents' green grocery store as a bagger). Highschool was naturally worse. Hoseok was the shining star of their student body, he was so unbearable in all of his glory.
Maybe the real crux was senior year when they got accepted to the same college in some sick cosmic twist of fate and thus the vicious cycle of never quite having enough space away from Hoseok to breathe was continued. Four more years of stepping on each other's toes. Four more years of watching everyone stare at Jung Hoseok like he was Christ reborn.
For an alpha, Hoseok was perfect. Bold and bright and charismatic. For an omega, Yoongi was all but a dud. Abrasive, avoidant, and far from desirable.
But no, all of this is too long ago, it’s unfortunate water under a miserable little bridge. They’re seniors now, Yoongi needs to think in the present. And presently, the cataclysmic event that kicked off a butterfly effect that brought him here began last night in the wake of a home win for the basketball team, headed up (unsurprisingly) by none other than Hoseok himself.
Yoongi attended, as he usually does, because Namjoon plays on their university team and Namjoon is his friend. The win was more or less expected, they had a good run in the season prior and this year is shaping up to be no different, but it still calls for celebration.
Yoongi’s first mistake was allowing Namjoon to talk him into it. He never parties, he hates parties. Too loud, too fast, too warm, but there’s this thing about saying no to Namjoon that makes it sort of impossible. He’s this big, lumbering beta with an imposing body, a sweet face, and an even sweeter personality to match. Saying no to him feels akin to kicking a puppy. It’s just one of those things that one can’t do in good conscience, so Yoongi didn’t, for once.
He marched back to his flat, and changed into something comfortable for staying out late in, and then he walked back to the cluster of fraternity buildings where students were already gathering in clusters, lighting up the space with their bass-boosted music and raucous laughter.
Hoseok was there already, obviously. When Yoongi first saw him he was on the front steps perched on the shoulders of a classically handsome alpha that Yoongi doesn’t recognize, being paraded around like some sort of well-regarded pharaoh.
There was alcohol, because there’s always alcohol at these kinds of things. Yoongi doesn’t drink much, he doesn’t like the way it makes him feel all mushy and overly warm, but last night he did for no particular reason. Maybe it was the fact that he had already finished his assignments and turned them in, or the way that Namjoon was mixing him somewhat disgusting cocktail creations with a heavy hand. More likely it was the fact that he needed to do something to take his eyes and his mind off of Hoseok, who danced on top of tables and effortless photos with all of the wannabe social media models and online influencers vying for his attention. It’s that annoying grace and duality of his, the juxtaposition that rests him somewhere between authoritative and easygoing, masculine and feminine. The liquor and cologne-scented sweat shining on his brow, the way his jersey drapes at his narrow waist, oh Yoongi hated the sight of him. All of him.
Too intoxicating. Too perfect. He’s a nightmare.
The night starts to blur there, muddled by alcohol consumed too quickly and too recklessly. Yoongi was several drinks in by the time Hoseok noticed him (because he never does seem to notice him the way he notices other people. Yoongi is perpetually an afterthought to Hoseok) and that’s when Hoseok started needling him.
“You never dance, Yoongi-hyung,” he had lamented, turning Yoongi into the laughing point of the gaggle of hangers-on attached to him. “You come to these parties just to be a downer in the corner.”
“ I don’t like dancing, ” Yoongi had retorted flatly. “ Some of us can have fun without making a fool of ourselves.”
“ You call it making a fool of yourself but I call it time well spent. I could teach you, if you wanted. I could always show you a good time, hyung.”
Yoongi had much resisted the urge to slosh the contents of his plastic cup in Hoseok’s face. Instead, he turned and slipped back into the crowd of moving bodies, resolving to avoid Hoseok for the rest of the night. Only they ran into each other again. And again. And again. It was as if, no matter how large the house was, or how many people filled it, they kept ending up face-to-face. They might as well have been locked in a closet together for how difficult it was to stay out of each other's presence.
The timeline gets even more blurred after that. Yoongi found himself caught in a hallway, having fallen into the ever-persistent trap of arguing with Hoseok. It’s bound to happen with the two of them, as much as Yoongi tries to avoid it. He doesn’t even remember what started it, or why it continued, but he does remember Namjoon appearing at some point, slurring his speech and informing Yoongi that they should take off.
And fuck, they should have, but once Yoongi starts he can’t stop. If he was getting into it with Hoseok then he wasn’t copping out. There’s this strange, unspoken pressure, the desire to prove himself when it comes to Hoseok. They’ve known each other for too long, long before either of them presented and Yoongi thinks it’s given him some sort of stupid complex.
I can still keep up with you. I can still hold my ground. You’re not tougher than me just because you’re an alpha.
Of course he was stupid. Of course, he didn’t leave. He let Namjoon stumble away on his own so he could stay tangled in whatever idiotic disagreement that had somehow become urgent in his drunk mind.
It was all… too much. The temperature in the house between all of the movement and people was sky high. The music, the laughter, the talking, it was all in Yoongi’s face, offensively loud and abrasive. Or maybe it was Hoseok in his face, fighting to be heard over the volume level around them.
Yoongi doesn’t know how or when everything went sideways after that. It had to have been the alcohol, it’s always the alcohol. One moment he and Hoseok were in the hallway, chest to chest and posturing each other up, and the next he was flat on his back in someone’s bed, hands tangled in Hoseok’s silky, sweaty hair while they bit bruise-blooming kisses into each other’s skin, every bit as aggressive as it was lustful.
All Yoongi can remember is that it was like every fight they’ve ever had, filled with demand and the distinct unwillingness to be gentle or lenient, only this time there had been a tangible release. A culmination of the tension peaking and snapping, delivering them both to an almost cathartic state of unwind. And then they did it all over again. The details are a hazy mess, most of them just out of reach of retrieval, but he’s sure of one thing. It was the most disgustingly erotic, blissful sensation of his entire life, and he hates it. It never should have happened. They never should have happened.
And now he’s here, riddled with something that is the exact opposite of the morning afterglow. The morning after void, it feels like.
Yooni inches the twisted bedsheets back, just far enough to extricate himself from them and perch on the edge of the bed instead of wholly on top of it. Hoseok is still sleeping, rolled on his stomach with his face buried in pillows mere feet away. He looks at ease like this, although Yoongi can’t actually make out his face from this angle. The lines of his body are relaxed, his sun-kissed skin all honey golden and soft in contrast to the white bedding he’s nested himself into.
Deceptively sweet , Yoongi thinks sourly. Jung Hoseok is not a joy to be around, contrary to popular belief. He’s a menace and he’s shallow and Yoongi is going to do everything in his power to put this behind him and pretend it never happened, starting now.
He plants his feet on the floor and stands, bracing himself on the bedpost when his head swims nauseatignly, almost sending him straight down to the floor.
He could have been gentler, Yoongi muses, disgruntled. His body feels more kicked around than a soccer ball on game day, littered with marks and bruises as if Hoseok took his sweet time making sure Yoongi would feel everything the next morning. Knowing him, he probably did that on purpose.
Yoongi stumbles toward the bathroom, clamping his hand over the raised bruise on his neck that’s making itself uncomfortably known. It feels tender beneath the pads of his fingers, sensitive like a bundle of nerves. Yoongi swears that when he presses it even lightly he feels all the way down in the pit of his stomach, a series of electrified sparks. It’s somehow pleasant and unbearable at the same time, which doesn’t make a shred of sense to him.
The bathroom is a cluttered mess, which adds up for a frat house (Yoongi can’t believe he fucked Hoseok, drunk, in a frat house of all places. It’s like he chose last night to tear down every single one of his moral boundaries one by one) but he’s able to pick his way over scattered solo cups and cigarette butts to stand in front of the cracked mirror, sizing up his condition.
He’s a little grayish, but that’ll probably be the hangover coming at him with a vengeance. His hair is mussed so badly it’s almost knotted in places, and his clavicles and throat might as well be painted for how bitten over and bruised they are. Yoongi finds himself doing a double take as he traces over the marks left behind, leaning close to squint at his reflection. At first he thinks it’s a dent in the cracked mirror and nothing more, but he can feel it. That same sensitive bruise on the juncture of his neck, the most vulnerable spot on an omega.
The most vulnerable spot on an omega.
Yoongi feels the way he gulps, jolting closer to the mirror as if he were electrocuted by a sudden thought. They would never be that fucking stupid, that reckless , ever. Even with a heady dose of alcohol, it couldn’t have happened, not like this.
Yoongi almost scrambles onto the sink itself in his urgency to get a better look, tipping his head as far to the side as he can in order to peer at his purple-blooming throat. When he sees it, his heart falls through his chest, landing somewhere far away. Fuck, it probably crashes through the floor beneath him and sinks into the ground to bury itself along with his pride and self-respect.
The mark on his neck is familiar. It’s the mark he’s seen on his parents, his grandparents, family friends, and strangers alike. It’s the teeth-bitten indentations, forming miniature bruises of their own, fresh and sore. The mark they learn about in the sub-par sex ed courses of high school, all blushing and wondering when or if they’ll ever bear it, in all of its significance.
And Yoongi carries one now, hungover in the bathroom of a random frat house, almost blacking out where he stands as the realization hits him with the force of a tsunami.
It’s a mating mark, brand new and pink and perfectly shaped and awful.
A mating mark. On Yoongi.
Jung Hoseok fucking mated him.